Why did you wipe the boards instead of moving the runs? That comes off as really lazy and/or selfish.

Why did you wipe the forums? That's really lame.

Also this category layout is much worse IMO. The old way would've been fine with just adding "all boards" or something. If you wanted to split Solo/Co-op, that's what subcategories exist for.

I think IGT counts pretty much every frame except the cutscene at the beginning that you have to hit escape for. It seems to stop either at last input or the curtains, not sure.

IGT primary with RTA on last input as a tiebreaker seems fine. It makes my run 6 seconds faster because I didn't hit escape, not that it really matters in the scheme of things.

Do we want to end timing on the last input or the closing of the curtains? I always personally thought it was last input.

They're about 0.3-0.4 seconds apart, and we don't have it documented in the rules.

(Also, I just added mcill as a mod.)

REALLYDAD 100% appears to be 24 hearts, 6 flasks, 4 power, 4 regen. If someone knows of a missing power-up, we can correct the board at a later date.

Disclaimer: I'm not on staff any more, but I wrote most of the content on the pages linked in this thread.

I spent a substantial amount of time on the rules. I probably should've spent more time polishing the game request text. As a result there was at least one sentence where I should've chosen my words better. If someone had initially pointed out that wording was bad, I would've gladly changed it. That portion as a whole should probably be re-expressed as "evaluation criteria" as opposed to the current description. I specifically made this thread ahead of time for feedback on the pages because I know I didn't get it all right the first time.

There has been debate in the past over "Quality Control" versus "No Quality Control" with game requests. My opinion has always been quality control, and I think that's what the majority of the users want. A few people have voiced support for no quality control in the past, and if that's your opinion please feel free to speak up. If we agree that the majority of the users want quality control, we need to try to define quality control.

To indirectly address some points brought up:

1: This is not really any change from previous policy, it's just trying to articulate it more precisely. If the game has a reasonable amount of depth and quality, we typically want to add it.

2: This section of the rules specifically does not apply to console releases or PC releases by notable developers. The header is specifically worded for the things it applies to.

3: I guess "effort" wasn't really the intent of the guideline, the intent was "product quality". I'm sorry if "effort" sounds condescending. We're trying to put the right words to these concepts. How does one talk about a game lacking the qualities worth putting it on the site without saying or implying something mildly negative about it?

4: I agree with some of the things Dangerless pointed out. The tiny 30 second meme flash games frequently pop up, for the flavor of the week, and then no one plays them any more. Furthermore, the type of people participating in these 30 second meme flash games are much more likely than an average user to cause trouble and do stupid things with the board, which leaves staff cleaning up a mess. This is just an observation from experience. This is also part of my argument for quality control. The more games of the lower quality we add, the more problems staff have to handle on a weekly basis.

5: The focus of "played by people" was intended for exposure of the game to the general population rather than "runners" If the game has 30 plays on scratch.mit or whatever, is that a good criteria for adding to SRC? It could certainly be reworded. We're just looking for some metric to assist with quality control. These were intended to be soft guidelines to help evaluate whether to add the game or not.

6: Truth be told, I've spent hundreds of hours sorting through ambiguous requests for non-notable flash games. It's probably the biggest reason things take forever to get through the game request queue. Everyone on staff gets a little jaded to this topic, because it's a horrible gray area and no one can quite agree on where to draw the line. I've probably said some not nice things in reference to these sorts of games in the past. In layman's terms, they kinda suck to deal with. That's just the reality of it. I usually try not to say a game sucks, but try to picture a flash game that just sucks.

7: The "speedrun optimization" guideline was intended for "hold right to win", or "click a few things to win" type games. That criteria was intended for games where there's not much depth.

Honestly the constant Twitter dogpiling makes being a staff member a giant headache. I find it far more egregious than writing a bad sentence or two in a guideline. People always assume the worst thing a sentence could possibly mean and overreact. It works out a lot better when people talk and develop an understanding. We can ask to fix guidelines, bring up that guidelines seem condescending, or we can Twitter dogpile. That's a part of why I'm sitting over here as a regular user now.

Try to be decent to people, I don't think that's asking too much. The site isn't run by some terrible corporation, it's primarily people volunteering their free time.

After 4.5 years as an admin with site staff, I am resigning from site staff effective immediately.

I made site staff aware of my plans to exit about a month ago, and I will make myself available to site staff for consultation for some additional period of time. There are a couple ongoing items I'm advising on in the background. Please do not contact me to help with site issues any longer, I will probably refer you to this post. I no longer have site admin powers to handle these issues. Contact the full mods or Pac, depending on the type of issue.

I need to move on with my life, and I need less stress in my life. The ongoing conflict and disagreement in maintaining the site for the community has taken its toll on me over the years both physically and mentally. I've lost plenty of sleep over the years dealing with site conflicts, crisis management, and whatever else goes along with that. In recent months I've been having substantial issues with stress to a much larger extent than in the past. More recently I've been having moderate health problems for about 6 weeks that I'm still trying to get through. I should be fine in a couple months.

Being an admin on the site was never a position well-suited for someone like me. I don't gain any sort of happiness from resolving conflict or helping people resolve issues. I'm far happier in life as an engineer at my day job than as a customer service representative or a community manager. My primary goal was always to help organize a successful system for maintaining leaderboards for the community.

The early organizational phases of leaderboards, which I was involved with prior to speedrun.com had substantial failures. At that time I was extremely stressed out and disappointed with how things had turned out. I felt a personal obligation to help get the site going due to those previous failures. When I first came on to site staff, I was intending to help with the start-up phase and exit a few months after. I ended up filling numerous roles doing things that needed done to keep the site running, and here we are 4.5 years later. One regret I have is that I failed to help get involved many capable people who have reached out over the years

I don't claim to have been the best person for this job. I think I did alright. There are people out there who would've done a better job. There are a substantial number of people who would've done a worse job.

I've spent multiple thousands of hours of my life handling the day-to-day for the site, and I'm down about 80 dollars for server upgrades for a couple months a few years back. I've reviewed almost 10,000 game requests since April 2016, and many more prior to that. I handled almost all of the moderation requests and disputes up until the last couple years. This is something I did in my free time for over 4 years, and I never wanted to treat it like a job. I'm very cognizant that I've inherently burdened myself too much. I'm very burnt out.

I personally find public relations and community management to be very stressful. Community managers at various gaming related organizations generally don't last for more than a few years. The social media environment can be very toxic, and even aside from that, the hyper-connectivity of the social environment just puts conflict and disagreement on your doorstep daily. I find that most people I've interacted with are genuine people who have reasonable concerns. It turns out that reasonable people still disagree with each other frequently. There's just an infinite amount of negativity out there, and I think people should actively try to not contribute to it. I think we amplify the negatives in life all too often.

I think the site is still lacking various features to make life easier for staff, users, and moderators. Many problems that manifest as people problems are attributable to system shortcomings. These things obviously take time, effort, and prioritization. I feel some responsibility for failing to solve some of the more complex organizational issues with the site that still exist today.

It is my opinion that the site needs to work towards functioning more like an organization. The site is extremely large compared to the size of staff, and it needs more tools for people to handle issues at lower levels. The site needs to be careful and deliberate with the design decisions it makes, because small changes can have very significant impacts on moderators and users. As a primarily community driven website, I think the site should only be in the business of doing things that the majority of users want it to do.

I'm very thankful for everyone that has helped the site get to this point. Pac, it's been a wild ride. There's so much more to say than that, which I can't adequately put into words. Kabuki, Lighnat0r, and more recently Volvagia, thank you for helping solve some serious and complex problems over the years. To the rest of staff, thank you for carrying forward, and I sincerely apologize for any additional burden caused on you by my exit. To the community, thank you for helping build the site to what it is today. Through the site, a substantial amount of communities have greatly expanded to connect people with common interests and to provide a wealth of knowledge on various games.

I hope this post meaningfully articulates my personal experiences, and provides some understanding of why I need to leave staff. It has been an extreme learning experience for me personally, and I wouldn't be the person I am today without having been through this. I'm not going to go so far as to say I'll never rejoin staff, but I will say that I currently have no future intentions of rejoining staff. Out of respect for the rest of staff, I intend to minimize my public discussion of my opinions on site direction going forward.

As for me, I'm working towards improving my lifestyle. I intend to substantially reduce my social media presence going forward. I'm finding it unhealthy for a person like me. Spending half my life on the internet hasn't been the best for me. I'll still be around playing games with friends and showing up to events and things like that.

I'm not really looking for thanks or anything, I'm just seeking to inform and offer insight. I'm leaving town for a while later today due to additional life issues.

I added some of these things.

ShikenNuggets: 1: I'd rather not give people the idea. I think more people would do it if they realized it was a way to be an idiot. 2: I'll reword that section.

Some of the redundancy is intentional to remind both the users and the moderators what the expectations are from both sides.

On "should/shall/generally", I tried to pick appropriate words. There's always some corner case where someone might have a really really good reason to do something differently. There are a pretty small number of items that fall under "shall"

New pages now exist with substantial text describing how the site handles things.

https://www.speedrun.com/rules https://www.speedrun.com/moderationrules https://www.speedrun.com/requestgame https://www.speedrun.com/gamerequestrules

This is a work in progress to document all of the confusing things that go on around here. There should not be anything particularly surprising in there, but there is some clarification on a few gray cases we've run into over the years.

If you have feedback, questions, or additions for the documents, or if you disagree with the wording of something, please let me know.

This current set of documents does not attempt to cover the topics of FAQs, Leaderboard Setup, Getting Started, Recording Guides, Speedrunning Glossarys, Recommended Emulators, Recommended Console Guidelines. Those may be separate pages in the future.

The focus of this is on the rules and the game requests right now.

stew_: General consensus among staff is that this specific situation should be handled among the game's community and moderators due to the size of the game's community and the complexity of issues at play here. I don't think site staff can or should make an overarching rule for this situation because it is a very complex situation.

He was / is just testing some stuff.

The site cannot be in the business of publicly reprimanding staff. No organization works like this. If you have an issue with a staff member, it needs to be handled by the staff as a whole. Public lambasting is not a solution to this problem, it is an additional problem.

Moreover, we don't want to erect a monument on the site to a day someone messed up. There's nothing good that comes out of sitting here and debating this in public for a week. Do we want to hang everyone's dirty laundry on the front of the site forums for a month? Nobody needs a sign hanging out front of their workplace that they messed up. We've spent substantial time and effort trying to mediate this situation. We messed up, we corrected the situation, and we're internally very disappointed that it happened. I feel poorly about it, the staff feels poorly about it. Nobody is sitting here thinking that circumstances that happened are acceptable. We've addressed the situation with the staff members involved. We have to move forward from this.

I feel like nothing I can say or do at this point is viewed as an improvement to the situation other than punitive actions against staff, which I've already described in detail as to why I do not view those as appropriate in this circumstance.

Staff as a whole views it as a very bad idea to keep this thread open for public commentary for a week. We're going to lock this thread later today. If you have anything else to say before then, feel free. If you want to continue the discussion privately after that, feel free. If others have private comments on the matter, feel free to forward them to me or other staff.

To reiterate much that was discussed previously that was deleted:

A pedantic compliant was given by a group of people to a content mod. Since content mods cannot change board moderators, the complaint was forwarded to the rest of staff. A staff member who doesn't usually handle moderation interpreted this as an action item of something that needed done, and made the change without thinking much of it. Further complicating the matter, the board audit logs were broken last week, so we couldn't see board edits back in time to corroborate much of anything until recently.

From an organizational perspective, I'm not a fan of throwing specific staff members under the bus for these things. People make mistakes or bad decisions to varying degrees. Publicly blaming specific staff members that are more peripheral to the situation unfortunately puts the site at risk of higher staff attrition. We're here to be accountable for those other decisions made by staff, so that everyone on staff doesn't have to be subjected to this. I agree that specific decisions need proper reasons provided by staff, under most circumstances. The fact is, as an organization, we need to do better to ensure situations like this don't occur.

I don't agree with the decision of yet an additional staff member to delete the posts without discussing it with the user, especially in this case. This topic should've just cooled off in the moderation thread.

This has all been discussed in substantial detail internally amongst staff. Whether it's sitting out here in public or not, it is of high concern to staff that a situation like this was even able to occur. It would certainly make all of our days a lot better if incidents like this didn't slip through. Almost all of us on staff are doing this in our free time and don't get much of anything out of it.

I was asked by various people to handle this, and I discussed the situation and outcome with the other site staff full mods involved.

The state of the moderators on the board has to represent a general community consensus. There are numerous players of this game and additional feedback from players of other games in the series who have expressed strong dissatisfaction with the current state of moderation.

It looks like the addition of the recent moderator was done unilaterally without regard for the opinion of the other moderators. The current situation does not appear stable at all. The moderator taking the action to add the additional moderator hasn't been active with handling issues with the board until just recently deciding to take this action, which adds to the dissent. The way this happened suggests there was little to no effort to discuss or reach some consensus on who should be moderating. There is not strong support even in these forum discussions for that outcome aside from people who do co-op runs together with the user. It was mentioned explicitly in this thread a few times that the other people moderating did not want the user added. There are almost certainly people available who can moderate the game without creating such a divide between the community.

I do agree the rules were lacking in detail. I also agree that the verification and handling of runs was lacking. Regardless of those two points, the moderation still has to represent community consensus.

We're going to let the last remaining moderator, who has high community involvement, choose a moderation team to hopefully remedy the situation.

mixmastapj: I pointed Pac to your post.

A few game moderator accounts were compromised on April 1, in a very similar manner to what happened back in November. About 3 to 5 accounts moderating a few prominent boards were compromised. The cause is still understood to be a few users using or re-using passwords that were compromised from other sites years ago. We implemented password re-use stipulations and reset everyone's password again. We also rolled back the database to shortly after 2019-03-30 23:37 US Eastern. The description of November's issues is here: https://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/l1r3e

If your password was a password that was not previously used on a compromised website, your account was never at risk. We're acutely aware that resetting passwords and rolling back the database is a disappointing approach. In order to get the site up today, that's what we went with. We have every intention to implement further safeguards against this method of account compromise.

The site's leaderboards as a whole are only as secure as the least secure user, and we're very aware this is a problem. We intend to implement further protection against known compromised passwords from other websites. We currently intend to utilize the pwnedpasswords API, which offers built-in anonymity in password match requests: https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/

It is our current understanding that every compromised password was gained from that list. We're looking into the logistics for implementing 2-factor authentication as well. 2FA could potentially be mandatory for game moderators, if that is seen by the community as acceptable. If it's optional it only protects people who want to be protected.

Hours prior to all of this, a couple users also took the opportunity for April Fools to trash a couple boards. Those were also cleaned up by the database rollback. We'll address that facet for April 1 2020. There is some additional work to make damaged board cleanup much easier, such as site staff being able to restore from backups easily. Restoring a single board is currently a very manual process that only a couple people know how to do currently.

The "timer is required" misconception pops up every once in a while. As a general rule timers should not be required unless there is some specific need to require them such as using "time without loads with an auto-splitter". I think this idea can be a bit of a misconception of boards norms more than anything. I don't think it's fair to assume that anyone who could have this misconception is necessarily lazy or whatever else.

I think there was some communication breakdown here and I think we should try to resolve this privately in a couple days.

I switched the e-mail addresses on the two accounts after verifying/discussion with Daravae. You can reset your password through the site login now. I typically handle these via Twitter DMs.

ShinkenX: The site's games have users who volunteer to moderate for each game. They do it in their free time and we typically give them at least 3 weeks to handle run submissions. Some people might only check the site on weekends for example. Generally someone demanding moderator in the way you're currently doing would not make a very good person to put in charge of a board. If you would take a break from swearing and being angry, I think you would find that we're generally reasonable people to discuss things with.

qwerf: I tend to dislike the no game verification option (we've contemplated ways to obsolete it), and the user has low responsiveness/contactability, and games should generally have more than one mod. Given all of that together, I'm fine with adding you. Otherwise, my default answer would generally be talk to the moderator.

Boomdabah: Neither user is really around, so I'll add you.

yoshifruit: I mean that's cool and all, I was just pointing out to my fellow staff member that you and your friend were blatantly making things up to try to get mod on games you don't have runs of. Seemed problematic to me so I was just letting him know.

NeylioFR: Could you discuss this on the game forum, or talk to the moderators: https://www.speedrun.com/re2remake/forum I don't know enough about the game to know how they would want to list the run, otherwise I could make the change.

cheating: Still going to wait on this. I didn't read everything, so we can look at it next pass.

zoNE: I'll go ahead and just add you since the users are highly inactive and you have a long-pending run. (I also find the site not having PMs to be a pile of garbage, but that's probably beside the point at the moment.)

T1redMonkey: The mods are active, please discuss it with them. I bumped one of them up to super mod.

Tron_Javolta: Bumped you up

SloaTheDemon: This seems fine based on their activity/relative consensus.

davidwiki8: The users are excessively inactive, so I'm fine with making this change.

MegaVortex: Mod has been inactive a while and you have a lot of approved runs, ok.

TheGreenViper8: In general series don't necessarily require mods, since games can be requested through the game request form. Is there some consensus between some of the mods of those games? We could look into this more, but right now you're essentially nominating yourself. We'd like some consensus by other moderators if they think this is a good idea.

yoshifruit/Otterstone_Gamer: I'm not adding you guys to games you don't have runs of. From my perspective you were making things up last request to try to convince us to mod you on more things.

Rayquaza911: Generally we wouldn't retroactively enforce, but in this specific case I think it's beneficial to have another moderator since there is only one with no socials and you already mod a bunch of NES games.

boundingrey: I'll add you for the specific game you have a run of for now.

Léone: Mods are highly inactive, okay.

Exgert: Please discuss it with the existing moderators, they are active.

Maiguels: Got it thanks. There was a bug when adding a series with the same name as a game and I apparently didn't fix everything.